EU Biodiversity Baseline

At the beginning of 2010, the European Commission outlined the policy options for the EU post-2010 actions on biodiversity, and set a new target for the protection of biodiversity by 2020. To allow for the better measurement of achievements, the Commission considered the establishment of a reliable biodiversity baseline to be a key priority. Following this, the European Environment Agency (EEA) together with its European Topic Centre on Biological Diversity (ETC/BD) prepared the first EU Biodiversity Baseline. As one of the consortium partners of the Topic Centre, ECNC had a significant involvement in the drafting process.

Objectives

The EU Biodiversity Baseline was considered to be a high policy priority and it supported the Commission's presentation of a new EU Biodiversity Strategy at the end of 2010; it acted as one of the basic references for setting robust, well argued and reliable post-2010 biodiversity subtargets. The work also supported the international negotiations on a new global post-2010 biodiversity vision and targets to emerge from the CBD-COP 10 held in October 2010 in Nagoya, Japan.

Time frame

2010 International Year of Biodiversity

Partners

ETC/BD and European Environment Agency (EEA)

Funder

This work was funded by the European Environment Agency.

Output

The Baseline provides facts and figures on the state and trends of the different biodiversity and ecosystem components in 2010, allowing further measuring and monitoring of progress in the EU from 2011 to 2020. No new collection of data was done for this work; rather it is based on existing information compiled from Article 17 reporting, the EU Red List of species, SEBI2010 indicators and report, the update of CORINE Land Cover 2006 and from various research projects.

A Biodiversity Baseline summary and a flyer were presented at the opening session of the Green Week in Brussels on 1 June 2010. The full report, which will include a gap analysis, was made available at the CBD-COP 10 in Nagoya, Japan and can be downloaded at the EU Biodiversity Baseline website.